Why Your Favourite Director is Actually Making the Same Movie Forever

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Why do people make films? Money,  self-expression, validation. Yes, but I think there's one more reason. I'm Mahesh, a film buff and an aspiring filmmaker. Today we  are discussing a little bit of abstract topic.

[00:00:22]You must have heard people talk about filmmakers  in the sense that introducing you to the let's say the world of Bergman. What do they  mean by that world is actually there's this different films of that director,  different actors, different stories, different themes even but they still have some  emotional thread in them that connects these different films. Though there are also some  filmmakers who seek it without any story or plot preoccupations. What do I mean by all that  is one more reason why people also make films is that they are documenting their dreams so that  they can go back to them instead of just having them as memories. It's like they are building  homes which don't exist now or which won't exist in future. Because what's more haunting  than an abandoned home where you once belong.

[00:01:30]Look at Wonkar Y for example. Particularly in  the mood for love. It's a film that's marketed, discussed, and even remembered as a story  of unrequited love. But if you watch that film again and tries to make sense of  every scene in regards of the narrative, it won't. Not every scene will make sense because  those are there for what they evoke, not in us, but in the director. The film is set in 1970s  Hong Kong. A time and space where Wonkerwa grew up. It's about a world that have changed now. A  time from which he must have had good memories from like how he used to watch European films in  theaters with his mother. So the film beside being about unrequited love is also about bringing  that lost time back to life and documenting it so one can return to it. that otherwise is just  a memory. While something like Junking Express documents the contemporary '90s Hong Kong that  he was living in and now even that's a valuable document. Wonkerva used themes of loneliness and  unrequitted love to sort of sell the films and invite others to have a look at his creations.  But I'm not saying that these themes doesn't matter. They do. But saying that that's why  people make films would be very undermining of the medium of cinema itself and what it  can do. There are also filmmakers like Brass, Tarovski, Bergman who are not that preoccupied  with plots and ideas but are just searching.

[00:03:15]There's an unrelentless seeking of something in  their films. These are filmmakers who believe in the dreamlike state of cinema and have  built their own personal landscapes where we are just visitors interpreting their personal  dreams from our own similar experiences of life and all this is not just a part of observation for  me like I'm not just looking at this filmmaker and thinking that Why it's like that? It's also an  introspection for me as a filmmaker. I recently just finished a narrative shot an idea of which  is just a guy who realized a joke late. There are three friends. Two make joke on this one  guy. He don't understand it and goes through his whole day. In the evening he realizes the  joke. I thought it's a funny and simple concept.

[00:04:17]But what's actually fascinated me is not this  idea of delayed realization. It's the whole day where the guy is going through life. So I wrote  scenes where I depicted relaxing village life of young boy waking up going to farm for work  in the afternoon his friends joining eating in the shade in those stiffens taking out water  through a bucket and drove from the well sleeping below those trees something I lived something I  wanted to document that idea just enabled me to do that while giving the whole thing a sense of  movement ment and a reason for others to enter that world. This is what actually made me think  about all this. I know it's simple thing but do people actually make films just to communicate  ideas because I certainly don't. So that's all for this video. I will see you on the next Sunday  hopefully. This week I will be shooting this video and I will upload the process of making it on the  next week. So see you then. Have a nice day. Bye.